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Author ORCID Identifier

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7027-1485

AccessType

Campus-Only Access for Five (5) Years

Document Type

dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Degree Program

Management

Year Degree Awarded

2019

Month Degree Awarded

September

First Advisor

Thomas Moliterno

Second Advisor

Steven Floyd

Third Advisor

Craig Wells

Fourth Advisor

Rory Eckardt

Subject Categories

Strategic Management Policy

Abstract

Human capital has been conceptualized to be a valuable strategic resource that can lead to sustained competitive advantage, and as such, employers are increasingly realizing the importance of hiring skilled and qualified employees. Thus, the competition for human capital has intensified over the years, and research on “employer branding” has become salient. In this dissertation, I focus on an organization’s “external” employer branding activities (EEBAs), which are recruitment messages used to attract job seekers. Prior research has explored applicant attraction by considering separately the amount of information and attribute content in recruitment messages. I integrate these two related but theoretically distinct research streams to develop a typology of EEBAs. I draw on the Resource Based View, Strategic Human Capital, Marketing, and Consumer and Social Psychology literature to build theory around, and test the effectiveness of these EEBAs. While the recruitment literature has studied the impact of employer branding on employer attractiveness and recruitment related outcomes, very little research has examined how firm-level characteristics may influence the effectiveness of an organization’s EEBAs. This is an important research question because there are good reasons to believe that the effectiveness of different employer branding strategies will likely not be the same across all organizations, and instead will depend on firm-level characteristics. Accordingly, I posit that corporate reputation, an important firm-level characteristics in the context of recruitment, will moderate the success of EEBAs in influencing potential employees’ job pursuit behavior.

This research has important implications for the strategic human capital literature as well as practice, inasmuch that the correct use of EEBAs is likely to translate into the success of an organization’s recruitment efforts. Two experimental studies were conducted to test the hypotheses. The findings suggest that it is important for managers to strategically design EEBAs by considering the information amount and attribute content of recruitment messages, as well as the organization’s reputation.

DOI

https://doi.org/10.7275/3arq-9813

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

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